The rise of the 'Adderall novel': How our attention spans are changing the way authors write

“In August: each the pharmacies successful New York tally retired of Adderall: A Supply Chain Breakdown,” begins Anika Jade Levy’s 2025 debut novel, “Flat Earth.” What follows is simply a communicative told successful hasty paragraphs, pithy fragments and cynical dispatches from a conspiracy theory-infested America. Yet the novel, portion uniquely contemporary, joins a larger canon of fragmentary novels that resonate successful our integer property of dwindling attraction spans.

“Dept. of Speculation” by Jenny Offill is simply a forebear of the short-and-sweet literate canon. “The vogue erstwhile I was penning ‘Dept. of Speculation’ was for realist doorstopper books that were self-consciously astir large ideas,” explains the novelist, who published her now-classic fragmentary caller successful 2014. “Short novels and alleged autofiction were not being published much.”

Like the protagonists of Levy’s novel, today’s readers privation speed. Like the colonisation of American readers, leafage counts successful modern lit person been shrinking. This includes paragraphs, adjacent sentences. Epic novels similar the 800-page “Anna Karenina” person fallen retired of favor, replaced by short, incisive lit that mimics our integer lives. A 2022 survey by WordsRated, an planetary probe group, showed that bestselling books are getting shorter. The survey recovered that wrong the past decade, the mean magnitude of a New York Times bestseller dropped by much than 50 pages.

“If you spell backmost 100 years and look for an astonishing publication to read, it’s astir apt going to beryllium 500 to 600 pages long,” said Mitchum Huehls, an English prof astatine UCLA. “If you bash that today, you’re hard-pressed to find a large publication that’s 500 to 600 pages long.”

The reply is analyzable and dictated by trends successful literature. John Steinbeck’s classical 1952 caller “East of Eden” begins with a lengthy and exhaustive statement of the Salinas Valley. This masterful rumination connected mounting seems similar an anomaly successful modern literature. “I deliberation lit utilized to beryllium overmuch much committed to creating a world, creating a scene,” Huehls said. “Now it’s a batch astir crippled and enactment oregon quality — not truthful overmuch mounting and country location, which is what you get with Tolstoy oregon John Dos Passos.”

While shortening attraction spans whitethorn beryllium to blasted for the displacement successful literature, Huehls argues that immoderate writers are intentionally engaging with it. The resulting novels are poignant, urgent and brilliant. “There’s besides a batch of absorbing ceremonial experimentation — taking technological forms and integrating them, oregon moving literate questions up against those forms,” helium said, citing writers similar Offill, Jennifer Egan, Tao Lin and Ling Ma, who person recovered ways to merge exertion into the literate canon.

Levy said she was influenced by the fragmentary literate canon portion penning “Flat Earth.” “I deliberation that speedy prose is really beauteous timeless. You look astatine Renata Adler’s ‘Speedboat’ — it’s close determination successful the title,” Levy said of the 1976 novel. “The concerns of the publication are precise contemporary, but connected a ceremonial and enactment level, I was moving successful a tradition.”

Levy argues that fragmentary penning feels much authentic to existent reality. “Contemporary beingness feels progressively episodic. It’s hard for maine to conceive of my beingness arsenic a linear communicative with a coherent arc. So fragmented penning feels similar a ceremonial mode into penning realism erstwhile I’ve ne'er experienced world arsenic a single, continuous story,” she said.

Levy was shaped by the fragmentary canon portion penning “Flat Earth.” She cites Mary Robison’s “Why Did I Ever,” Adler’s “Speedboat” and Offill arsenic influences. “I work ‘Dept. of Speculation’ erstwhile it came out, but I returned to it erstwhile I was editing ‘Flat Earth’ to fig retired however to woody with dialogue, country enactment and transitions wrong of a fragmented constraint.”

“It’s the operation of everything I constitute being truly derivative and informed by everything I’ve ever work and past trying to bash thing new,” Levy said.

In 2014, Offill’s caller “Dept. of Speculation” was published and became lauded for its fragmentary style, often unwieldy azygous sentences that offered a analyzable representation of marriage. In 2015, the publication was shortlisted for the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction.

The caller became an artifact of the modern moment. “I consciousness overwhelmed by the magnitude of accusation that comes astatine maine connected immoderate fixed day. When I write, I privation to effort to quiescent the sound by paring my thoughts down to what feels astir essential,” Offill said. “Emotional momentum is precise important to me, and I effort to make a feeling of that successful my work. To bash that, I effort to travel Waldo Salt’s dictum: ‘Art is the elimination of the unnecessary.’”

Offill stumbled upon the benignant organically arsenic a caller mother, she explained. “I wrote ‘Dept. of Speculation’ successful small scraps conscionable aft I had a baby,” she says. “The benignant evolved retired of necessity astatine first, but I was besides trying to find a mode to seizure the fragmentary quality of my thoughts and the unusual mode clip seemed to beryllium moving successful fits and starts.”

While the fragmentary benignant mirrors the net age, Offill doesn’t needfully deliberation the inclination is permanent. “I deliberation lit is ever adapting to the infinitesimal we unrecorded in,” she said. “I’m not connected societal media, and my abbreviated novels instrumentality maine a ridiculous fig of years to write, but similar everyone else, I’m influenced by the net and the endless options of what to ticker and perceive to and read.”

Offill predicts a adjacent aboriginal successful which readers volition erstwhile again rejoice successful epic novels. “Lately, I deliberation we’re swinging backmost successful the absorption of ‘the big, baggy monster’ thought of what a caller is,” Offill remarks. “I’ve seen a batch of caller writers who look to beryllium pursuing successful the footsteps of the Austrian writer Thomas Bernhard, penning novels with sentences that spell connected for pages and pages. I’m a Bernhard fan, truthful I’m funny to spot wherever this goes. I’d similar to deliberation that there’s country for each of these styles.”

Connors is simply a writer surviving successful Los Angeles. She hosts the literate speechmaking lawsuit Unreliable Narrators astatine Nico’s Wines successful Atwater Village each month.